What's Best Next

You are here: Home / Archives for 1 - Productivity / d Productivity Systems (Architect)

Memorize Your Goals

by

Here is an off the cuff thought that I think may be fairly promising.

When it comes to productivity, there are several levels going on. In GTD they are called “horizons of focus.” They are:

  1. Mission
  2. Goals
  3. Roles
  4. Projects
  5. Actions

I know a lot of people have a hard enough time just keeping a current project list, and that’s OK. For those that have attained to the level of setting specific goals and writing them down, my suggestion is this: memorize them.

In other words, David Allen’s counsel to have everything “outside your mind” so that your mind doesn’t have to use up its RAM to remember what it has to do does not apply to the higher levels. It is a great principle for the level of projects and actions. But since the higher levels are more big picture by definition, there is not as much to have to remember up there.

In fact, if you want the higher levels (your goals and mission) to govern your choice of projects and actions — which you should — then really there is almost no choice other than to have your goals down cold. It is important to write them down, but if you are actually going to be using them and guiding your actions by them, they have to be in your head as well.

This is possible because you shouldn’t have very many goals. Or, better, each quarter you should identify the most important 3-5 goals for you that quarter. You might have many more longer-term goals. But these quarterly goals need to be kept very few, because otherwise you will not be able to focus on them.

Since they are few, they can be memorized. And since they can be memorized, you can actually be acting on them. If you don’t memorize them, you’ll have the cumbersome step of always having to look back at them whenever you are deciding which projects and actions to focus on. Either that, or you’ll just ignore them.

Just some thoughts. I know that this post actually raises whole fields of issues, such as how to do goals, where to keep them, how to organize them, the nature of long-term goals versus shorter-term goals, and so forth. Thus, I run the risk here of getting a bit out of order, and discussing particulars before having given the larger framework. But, for those who utilize the 30k foot horizon of goals, this is an idea that might be worth considering.

A Summary List of My Electronic Tools

by

Here is a quick list of some of the main tools I use:

At some point I will provide more detail on each of these and how I use them, but a straight list is hopefully a good place to start in the meantime.

Note that this list is just the electronic side of things (with the exception of my moleskine notebook for a capture tool), and I’m probably leaving several things out. I also have recommendations for the physical side — what type of stapler to get, what type of physical in box, and so forth.

Note that most of the above software is for the Mac. When I was on Windows, I used Outlook for email, calendar, contacts, and task management — and was relatively happy with it because I customized things very heavily (for details, see the David Allen Company whitepaper on Customizing Microsoft Outlook for GTD).

(Thanks to one of my readers for suggesting this post!)

Large Monitors: The Easiest Way to Increase White-Collar Productivity

by

Jakob Nielsen, the web usability guru, makes a point about large monitors that I completely affirm:

Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600×1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display increases productivity by at least 0.5%, you’ll recover the investment in less than a year. (The typical corporate overhead doubles the company’s per-employee cost; always remember to use loaded cost, not take-home salary, in any productivity calculation.)

Apple and Microsoft have both published reports that attempt to quantify the productivity gains from bigger monitors. Sadly, the studies don’t provide credible numbers because of various methodological weaknesses. My experience shows estimated productivity gains of 5-10% when users do knowledge work on a big monitor. This translates into about an 0.5-1% increase in overall productivity for a person who does screen-focused knowledge work 10% of the day. There’s no doubt that big screens are worth the money.

I personally use a 2048×1536 display, and I wouldn’t even call that a really big screen. Within the next 10 years, I expect monitors of, say, 5000×3000 to be in fairly common use, at least among high-end business professionals.

Starting at 1600×1200, users rarely stretch their browser windows to the full screen because few websites work well on such a wide canvas. Big windows are magic for working on spreadsheets, graphic design, and many other tasks, but not for the current paradigm of Web pages. Today, big-screen Web users typically utilize their extra space for multiple windows and parallel browsing.

In sum: Get a big monitor — at least 1600×1200 resolution and 24 inches. It might cost a little more, but in a very real sense it may be wasteful not to.

As an aside, here is a very interesting comment that he makes on where the web may be going as monitor resolution grows even more. Very, very interesting:

To serve Web users with truly big screens in the future, we’ll probably need a different paradigm than individual pages. Perhaps a more newspaper-like metaphor or a different information dashboard will prove superior down the road.

GTD Agenda

by

I’ve mentioned often that GTD is very good at the lower altitudes (projects and actions) but not as developed at the higher levels (goals and roles). Within the proliferation of online task management tools in the last couple of years, many of them also reflect this same strength at the lower levels, but less developed approach to the higher levels.

Recently an online service named GTD Agenda was pointed out to me. It is a productivity tool that was designed for implementing GTD with both the higher levels and lower levels in mind. So — after having this on my project list for far too long! — I’ve given it a quick spin to see how well it does.

As I talk about what I think it does well and what its gaps seem to be, this post might also give you a small window into the big picture of my own productivity approach.

[Read more…]

A Few Quick Examples on How to Make Your Tickler File Electronic

by

A “tickler file” is part of the standard GTD approach; most productivity folks also recommend having one. It allows you to “mail” actions and items to yourself in the future.

I have an “electronic tickler.” Instead of doing 43 physical folders (one for each day of the month, plus one for each month) and doing this manually, I just have a specific action list in my productivity system called “Action Calendar.” I keep my tickler items on that electronic list.

Here’s how that works. Every item on that list has a due date. “Due date” there really means “do on.” I check that list every day (well, most days) and the items with that day’s date are things that need to be done or brought to my attention on that day. I ignore everything in the future. The point of this list is that you don’t need to think about anything in it until the day it comes up.

This is a great way to keep track of repeating tasks that need to be done on a certain day. For example: changing your furnace filter every month or so. I have that as a monthly repeating item in my action calendar (probably every 6-weeks, actually, but you get the point). When it comes up, I change it. During all other times, I don’t need to think about it.

Another instance is processing notes you capture in your “capture tool.” You don’t want to just capture action items and other stuff you need to process, and then just leave it to your brain to remember to do it. I have a repeating task in my action calendar to process my notes.

An action calendar also works well for single items that come your way, and which you have to do at a certain time and cannot do until them. For example, when we moved and started our new trash service here, the company sent us two coupons for two free months. The problem is that you can only use them in two (future) months which they designated.

We received the coupons in November or something. The months they were to be used in were February and March. So, I created action calendar items for the first Saturdays in February and March that said “return [name of garbage company]’s billing coupon for free month.”

As you can see in this example, there was along with this a physical item to keep — the coupon I had to send in. Hence, I do keep one physical file for tickler items. I call it “pending.” It’s actually for more than just physical tickler items. It’s for any paper-based support material I need to keep which pertains to non-project actions. Paper-based support material for my electronic tickler fits in here great.

I thought to write this post because the action calendar item to send this in for March just came up. So I grabbed the coupon out of my pending file and sent it in. (Now I’m writing this post.)

Now, someone would say, “Paper is old-fashioned. That company shouldn’t have sent you actual paper coupons to send in.” Well, sure, but the fact is that they did. You have to be able to deal with the fact that not everything is going to be electronic.

I find this balance — keeping my tickler items electronically, but then when necessary keeping any physical support material in a single (rather than 43) physical folder that the electronic item then points me to — very useful.

I do also have other physical files beyond this one “pending” physical file, because the reality is that you do have paper to deal with. But that is for a set of upcoming posts (as soon as I can!).

Screenshot of My OmniFocus Setup

by

I will at some point (soon, though defined somewhat loosely) blog somewhat comprehensively and in detail about how I have my planning system setup.

In the meantime, I was talking about OmniFocus with a friend today and out of that conversation came a screen shot that captures the “big picture” of how I have it set up. I thought that some of you who use OmniFocus (or are considering it) might be interested.

In fact, this this is relevant beyond OmniFocus as well. I recommend setting up any planning system in this way, no matter what tool you use. This is how I did things in Outlook previously and, before that, did a variation of this with my paper planner.

Here is the screen shot:

of-screenshot

How to Hang Art Effectively

by

We’ve been dealing with hanging art at our house because of having just moved.

This is a corollary of productivity because it pertains to designing your wider environment effectively. You want your computer working effectively for you, your workspace working effectively, and then moving out from that, it makes sense to continue applying good principles to the rest of your work area and home.

Here are some helpful tips that came my way from art.com:

  1. Map your art first
  2. Hang art at eye level
  3. Group art to create unity
  4. Keep art in harmony with furniture
  5. Formal or casual?

You can read more details in the full article.

Do Goals Get in the Way?

by

Yes, that’s the point.

They get in the way of less important courses of action.

This does reduce flexibility — the flexibility to do what is not worth your time. But you should not set or implement your goals in a way that blinds you to genuine, spontaneous opportunity.

There’s the rub.

Seth Godin had two good posts recently that relate to both sides:

The Thing About Goals

Having goals is a pain in the neck.

If you don’t have a goal (a corporate goal, a market share goal, a personal career goal, an athletic goal…) then you can just do your best. You can take what comes. You can reprioritize on a regular basis. If you don’t have a goal, you never have to worry about missing it. If you don’t have a goal you don’t need nearly as many excuses, either.

Not having a goal lets you make a ruckus, or have more fun, or spend time doing what matters right now, which is, after all, the moment in which you are living.

The thing about goals is that living without them is a lot more fun, in the short run.

It seems to me, though, that the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact… those people have goals.

Willing to Be Lucky

I just heard Kurt Andersen quote E.B. White with this glorious phrase.

How willing is your organization to be lucky? What about you in your career and your marketing efforts? Or in the people you meet or the places you go or the movies you see or the books you read?

My closest friends each were found as a result of chance encounters and luck. So were my biggest ideas and some of my most successful ventures.

It’s very easy to plot a course for today that minimizes the chance of disappointment or bad outcomes or lousy luck.

I wonder if you could plot a different course, one that created opportunities for good luck?